Windmill BooksJust another WordPress site2015-02-19T16:02:16Zhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/feed/atom/WordPressChloe Healyhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/?p=47182015-02-19T16:02:16Z2015-02-19T16:02:16Z“Being brave is never easy. That’s why it’s good for you.”

Will has never been to the outside, at least not since he can remember. When a local boy goes missing, Will straps on his helmet and heads outside, embarking on an extraordinary adventure that pulls Will far from the confines of his closed-off world and into the throes of early adulthood and the dangers that everyday life offers.

If I Fall, If I Die is a remarkable début full of dazzling prose and unforgettable characters, as well as a poignant and heartfelt depiction of coming of age. The novel shows how sometimes being brave isn’t always about saving he world or facing up to your biggest fear, it’s the small everyday braveries that we manage.

With that sentiment in mind we think everyone needs to be aware of their own, or a friends, #littlebraveries. We have 5 copies of the If I Fall, If I Die hardback to giveaway. To enter simply:

1. Tweet how you or a friend was brave in a small way using the hashtag #SmallBraveries and ending the tweet @windmillbooks.

]]>0Chloe Healyhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/?p=47052015-02-16T16:41:29Z2015-02-16T16:41:29ZMichael Christie lives with his wife and two sons on Galiano Island, a small island just off the coast of Vancouver. He is a former professional skateboarder and his story collection, The Beggar’s Garden, was a finalist for a number of major Canadian prizes and the winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award. If I Fall, If I Die is his début novel.

Here he shares with us his writing space and how a walk to the river can help him solve a writing problem.

My family and I live in a small timber frame house that I recently built myself in the middle of a forest of tall Douglas fir and cedar. I write in a little cabin that my wife and her father, a carpenter who used to build sailboats, constructed in the mid 90s. The cabin is perfect for writing – spare but comfortable, and also out of wifi range, which is critical for me to get any fiction done. There is even a little loft bed where I can go up and read and nap if I’m tired or lacking inspiration.

My writing desk was one of the first things I ever built. The table is made of some oak planks a friend gave to me years ago that I glued together and finished, and the legs are just some plain old 2X4s. To me, writing is very much like carpentry, in that it usually requires a balance of precision and winging-it, of planning and improvisation, and can often take twice as long as you expect it will. The shelves in the cabin are lined with books that relate to my current project. I like to think of the cabin as a kind of physical manifestation of my brain, and whatever books and inspiration I bring into it will colour my work. It’s also nice because when I leave the cabin, I don’t obsess over the writing in the way I would when I used to work in my bed with my laptop.

Always above my desk I keep this strange, unfinished painting that I found at a thrift store many years ago in Vancouver. I imagine that some recently retired person had taken up landscape painting on a whim, and through the help of a book or a few classes, managed to produce this kind of painting backdrop before giving up. But I just love how it’s this big set up all for nothing. How there is no focal point, no object, no emotion. I keep it to remind me to avoid the same in my writing. That you can have all the literary framing devices and backdrops and settings in place, but you still need to portray something worth looking at. That said, at the same time I find this painting weirdly beautiful, so who knows…

Whenever I am stuck while working on something, I either have a shower or take a walk. My walks nearly always find me at nearby Bluff Park, which is owned in trust by the Island, and overlooks Active Pass, which is where most Vancouver’s ferry traffic funnels through. The first sound my son made was to mimic the ferry horns that we can hear from our place, especially when its foggy. The air in the park is sweet and fresh, and there are often eagles perched in the tall trees on the cliff, watching for silver flashes of salmon hundreds of feet below. By the time I’m walking the trail back down, I usually have generated a solution to my problem. It may not be the right solution, but a solution just the same.

]]>0Chloe Healyhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/?p=45712015-01-08T12:13:22Z2015-01-31T10:13:07ZSo here’s the big question, why is running SO good for us? We’ve heard it enough times, and if the success of the treadmill is anything to go by then, we really should pay some attention. Alexandra Heminsley enlightens us…

Don’t forget, it’s your last chance to get hold of the Kindle Edition of Running Like a Girl for just £1.99 today; don’t miss out, you’ll totally regret it.

#6 Why running is truly magical

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0Chloe Healyhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/?p=46262015-01-29T13:35:15Z2015-01-29T13:35:15ZWhen the Facts Change exemplifies the utility, indeed the necessity, of minding our history and not letting cheerful fictions suffice in its place.

A great thinker’s final testament: a characteristically wise and forthright collection of essays, spanning a career of extraordinary intellectual engagement.

Some of Judt’s most prominent and indeed controversial essays felt outside of the scope of Reappraisals, most notably his writings on the state of Israel and its relationship to Palestine. There would be time, it was thought, to fit these essays into a larger frame. Sadly, this would not be the case, at least during the author’s own life.

Now, in When the Facts Change, Tony Judt’s widow and fellow historian, Jennifer Homans, has found the frame, gathering together important essays from the span of Judt’s career that chronicle both the evolution of his thought and the remarkable consistency of his passionate engagement and intellectual élan.

Whether the subject is the scholarly poverty of the new social history, the willful blindness of French collective memory about what happened to the country’s Jews during World War II, or the moral challenge to Israel of the so-called Palestinian problem, the majesty of Tony Judt’s work lies in his combination of unsparing honesty, intellectual brilliance, and ethical clarity.

When the Facts Change exemplifies the utility, indeed the necessity, of minding our history and not letting cheerful fictions suffice in its place. An emphatic demonstration of the power of a great historian to connect us more deeply to the world as it was, as it is, and as it should be, it is a fitting capstone to an extraordinary body of work.

‘Jennifer Homans, Judt’s widow… sets the tone with her perfectly pitched introduction… this a welcome addition to Judt’s oeuvre’ Independent. Read the full review here

]]>0Chloe Healyhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/?p=46632015-01-29T13:38:36Z2015-01-28T11:00:49ZBelow is an extract from Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety; a riveting, revelatory and moving account of one man’s battle with anxiety, and a history of the efforts to understand the condition by scientists, philosophers, artists, and writers, from Freud to Hippocrates and from Samuel Johnson to Charles Darwin

An extract from My Age of Anxiety:

I have an unfortunate tendency to falter at crucial moments.

For instance, standing at the altar in a church in Vermont, waiting for my wife-to-be to come down the aisle to marry me, I start to feel horribly ill. Not just vaguely queasy, but severely nauseated and shaky—and, most of all, sweaty. The church is hot that day—it’s early July—and many people are perspiring in their summer suits and sundresses. But not like I am. As the processional plays, sweat begins to bead on my forehead and above my upper lip.

In wedding photos, you can see me standing tensely at the altar, a grim half smile on my face, as I watch my fiancée come down the aisle on the arm of her father: in the photos, Susanna is glowing; I am glistening. By the time she joins me in the front of the church, rivulets of sweat are running into my eyes and dripping down my collar. We turn to face the minister. Behind him are the friends we have asked to give readings, and I see them looking at me with manifest concern. What’s wrong with him? I imagine they are thinking. Is he going to pass out? Merely imagining these thoughts makes me sweat even more. My best man, standing a few feet behind me, taps me on the shoulder and hands me a tissue to mop my brow. My friend Cathy, sitting many rows back in the church, will tell me later that she had a strong urge to bring me a glass of water; it looked, she said, as if I had just run a marathon.

The wedding readers’ facial expressions have gone from registering mild concern to what appears to me to be unconcealed horror: Ishe going to die? I’m beginning to wonder that myself. For I have started to shake. I don’t mean slight trembling, the sort of subtle tremor that would be evident only if I were holding a piece of paper—I feel like I’m on the verge of convulsing. I am concentrating on keeping my legs from flying out from under me like an epileptic’s and am hoping that my pants are baggy enough to keep the trembling from being too visible. I’m now leaning on my almost wife—there is no hiding the trembling from her—and she is doing her best to hold me up.

The minister is droning on; I have no idea what he’s saying. (I am not, as they say, present in the moment.) I’m praying for him to hurry up so I can escape this torment. He pauses and looks down at my betrothed and me. Seeing me—the sheen of flop sweat, the panic in my eyes—he is alarmed. “Are you okay?” he mouths silently. Helplessly, I nod that I am. (Because what would he do if I said that I wasn’t? Clear the church? The mortification would be unbearable.)

As the minister resumes his sermon, here are three things I am actively fighting: the shaking of my limbs; the urge to vomit; and unconsciousness. And this is what I am thinking: Get me out of here. Why? Because there are nearly three hundred people—friends and family and colleagues—watching us get married, and I am about to collapse. I have lost control of my body. This is supposed to be one of the happiest, most significant moments of my life, and I am miserable. I worry I will not survive.

As I sweat and swoon and shake, struggling to carry out the wedding ritual (saying “I do,” putting the rings on, kissing the bride), I am worrying wretchedly about what everyone (my wife’s parents, her friends, my colleagues) must be thinking as they look at me: Is he havingsecond thoughts about getting married? Is this evidence of his essential weakness?His cowardice? His spousal unsuitability? Any doubt that any friend of my wife’s had, I fear, is being confirmed. I knew it, I imagine those friends thinking. This proves he’s not worthy of marrying her. I look as though I’ve taken a shower with my clothes on. My sweat glands—my physical frailty, my weak moral fiber—have been revealed to the world. The unworthiness of my very existence has been exposed.

***

Though some have argued that anxiety is a particularly American affliction, it’s not just Americans who suffer from it. A report published in 2009 by the Mental Health Foundation in England found that fifteen percent of people living in the United Kingdom are currently suffering from an anxiety disorder and that rates are increasing: 37 percent of British people report feeling more frightened than they used to. A recent paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association observed that clinical anxiety is the most common emotional disorder in many countries. A comprehensive global review of anxiety studies published in 2006 in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry concluded that as many as one in six people worldwide will be afflicted with an anxiety disorder for at least a year during some point in their lifetimes; other studies have reported similar findings.

Of course, these figures refer only to people, like me, who are, according to the somewhat arbitrary diagnostic criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association, technically classifiable as clinically anxious. But anxiety extends far beyond the population of the officially mentally ill. Primary care physicians report that anxiety is one of the most frequent complaints driving patients to their offices—more frequent, by some accounts, than the common cold. One large-scale study from 1985 found that anxiety prompted more than 11 percent of all visits to family doctors; a study the following year reported that as many as one in three patients complained to their family physicians of “severe anxiety.” (Other studies have reported that 20 percent of primary care patients in America are taking a benzodiazepine such as Valium or Xanax.) And almost everyone alive has at some point experienced the torments of anxiety—or of fear or of stress or of worry, which are distinct but related phenomena. (Those who are unable to experience anxiety are, generally speaking, more deeply pathological—and more dangerous to society—than those who experience it acutely or irrationally; they’re sociopaths.)

Few people today would dispute that chronic stress is a hallmark of our times or that anxiety has become a kind of cultural condition of modernity. We live, as has been said many times since the dawn of the atomic era, in an age of anxiety—and that, cliché though it may be, seems only to have become more true in recent years as America has been assaulted in short order by terrorism, economic calamity and disruption, and widespread social transformation.

Unlike Darwin, Freud, and James, I’m not out to adumbrate a whole new theory of mind or of human nature. Rather, this book is motivated by a quest to understand, and to find relief from or redemption in, anxious suffering. This quest has taken me both backward, into history, and forward, to the frontiers of modern scientific research. I have spent much of the past eight years reading through hundreds of thousands of the pages that have been written about anxiety over the last three thousand years.

To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I’m like a duck—paddling, paddling, paddling.’

]]>0Chloe Healyhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/?p=45682015-01-08T12:12:53Z2015-01-28T11:00:31ZIt’s here, your big day, the moment you’ve been waiting for after all those long and sweaty hours of training. How should you cope with pre-race nerves and wobbly knees? Alexandra has 3 great tips to keep you focused…you GO!

And if you haven’t got hold of your £1.99 Kindle edition of Running Like a Girl just yet, then hurry along – you can buy it here.

#5 How not to turn to jelly before the big day

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0Chloe Healyhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/?p=46332015-01-26T12:51:19Z2015-01-26T12:40:21ZWe’re thrilled to be publishing Lost & Found by Brooke Davis this week. Already a bestselling success in her native Australia, Brooke’s debut novel introduces three of the most memorable characters in Millie, Karl and Agatha and skilfully balances a heartfelt, profound and moving story alongside delightful humour and adventure. You can meet Brooke as she undertakes her own adventure, the Lost & Found Road Trip, visiting bookshops across the UK, working a shift (Brooke is a former independent bookseller so what better way to meet UK booksellers than lend a hand in their shops?), signing books, meeting book groups and holding events. Full road trip details can be found here. In the meantime, here’s word from Brooke about being published in the first place and what she thinks it is about the characters of Millie, Karl and Agatha that have made publishers all over the globe clamber to share their story with the world. What a star she is!

It’s May 2013. I’m sitting in a café in Nova Scotia, Canada, checking my emails, sipping on a cup of tea. My two brothers are there, too. We haven’t seen each other for a while, and they’re lost in a conversation about music. I can never keep up when they do this. Every band they mention is so obscure it sounds as if they’re making them up on the spot.

‘Hey,’ I say to them. ‘I just got this crazy email.’

‘Yeah?’ one of them says.

‘Yeah,’ I reply. ‘It’s from the guy who said he’d take Lost & Found to that publisher’s head office for me? It says: “Um, I don’t want to get your hopes up, but Vanessa from Hachette just rang me on a Sunday and said: Todd, if I don’t get to publish this book, I’ll cry.” ’

‘That’s pretty cool,’ one brother says.

‘Yeah,’ says the other.

‘Yeah,’ I say.

There’s no jumping around or anything. They continue their inaccessible conversation, and I read the email again, and continue sipping my tea. But they were right, you know: it was pretty cool, and it only proceeded to become cooler. Over the next couple of weeks, I would say goodbye to my brothers and head to Newfoundland, where I would negotiate the terms for the publishing contract with Hachette Australia. I would do it via a pay phone on a blustery St. John’s harbour in the dark hours of an early morning or two, straining to hear my agent’s voice as late night revellers imparted their rum-fuelled wisdoms on me.

A few months later, back in Australia, I would go about my life as normal: get up, brush my teeth, go to work at the bookshop, hang with friends, eat food, ride my bike. Write, think, read. Things as they had been and should be. But there was one thing that was startlingly different: people who weren’t my Dad were starting to read my book, and people who actually had the capacity to publish it. My email inbox would begin to overflow with unexpected gems of emails, like the gorgeous one from Sarah Rigby at Hutchinson that said that she, too, wanted to publish Lost & Found;emails that I would read and re-read and then re-read once more before sleeping, and once again the following morning, just to make sure it was all real.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m outside of my own body, sitting across from this girl who looks like me. I stare at her and think, ‘Well, isn’t she having a nice time?’ I’m suddenly allowed to begin sentences with, ‘My agent says…’ and ‘My publisher says…’ because I have them now, and they do say things. A lot of things. I don’t have to whisper that I’m a writer anymore. I can say it out loud, and in public, to other humans. I might have created a life for myself where I can write as The Thing I Do. Not just at nights, or on lunchbreaks, or on the train ride home. That is pretty cool.

I’ve been in a bit of a cave for the last five years writing this thing: shaping sentences at my desk, taking long walks to dream up scenarios for my characters, hanging up bits of my manuscript around my room with clothes pegs on string like a mad person. And now I’ve emerged, and suddenly, people in far-away places like the U.K., Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Canada and the Middle East—just to name a few—are relating to it. It’s an odd and wondrous thing. Lost & Found keeps stumbling upon the right people and I feel gloriously lucky.

My agent asked me the other day what I thought the reason might be behind different publishers connecting with it all over the world. I said, ‘I wouldn’t have a clue. Do you know? Can you tell me?’ I didn’t really expect anyone to get it. But I do wonder if it’s something to do with living and dying and grieving: we are all born, and we all die, and, if we are privileged enough to be on the earth long enough to develop meaningful relationships with others, then we will all grieve. But maybe it’s something to do, also, with laughter: maybe amidst the knowledge of all of this, we must also find a way to laugh.

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to share Lost & Found with the U.K., and am really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on my story.

If you’d like to hear more from Alexandra, why not have a read of her fabulous book Running Like a Girl - only £1.99 for the Kindle edition in the January sale…ready, set, GO!

#4 Running while still looking fabulous

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0Chloe Healyhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/?p=45562015-01-08T12:10:46Z2015-01-22T14:10:17ZGlucose? CHECK. Watch? CHECK. Forgetting to pack your essentials could create horrid haunting nightmares when it comes to running. Alex is back to keep us on the straight and narrow…

#3 Packing your running essentials

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0Chloe Healyhttp://www.windmill-books.co.uk/?p=45522015-01-08T12:05:33Z2015-01-18T12:02:32ZTrusty Vaseline, a good old cap and a bin bag – 3 out of 10 of the golden items no runner should be without. Find out what else should be coming with you as you take to the road as Alexandra returns with another dose of trusty running tips…